The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  On the second day, both the speechifying and the pageantry were drowned out by a horrible noise off. Blair was in the middle of chairing Cabinet when he was passed an urgent note. Bush was in Westminster Abbey paying his respects to the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior when the bad news was communicated to him. Two massive car bombs had been exploded in Istanbul outside the British consulate and the headquarters of the HSBC bank. The death toll was thirty-one, among them the British Consul-General. Al-Qaeda had again demonstrated its murderous talent for grabbing the world’s attention. In public responses to this attack, Blair and Bush uttered the now familiar vows to defeat ‘the fanatics of terror’. There must be, declared the Prime Minister, ‘no holding back, no compromise, no hesitation in confronting this menace’. He was forced to acknowledge that ‘there may be some who think that Britain, the United States and our allies have somehow brought this upon ourselves.’50 This was indeed a growing view. ‘The whirlwind is being reaped,’ argued the Guardian.51 Time magazine speculated that Britons were ‘now al-Qaeda’s favourite target’.52

  Two hundred thousand demonstrators marched across Westminster Bridge, booed, jeered and whistled as they passed Downing Street and rallied around Trafalgar Square that afternoon. The crowd roared its approval as a five-metre papier mâché effigy of Bush was pulled down in mimicry of the toppling of the statues of Saddam seven months earlier.

  When Blair and Bush posed on the doorstep of Number 10, the American President laid his hand on the shoulder of the Prime Minister. Bush was very adept at power gestures which sent subliminal messages about who was in charge of a relationship. David Hill, Blair’s communications chief, was once surprised to be grabbed in a neck lock by the President: an apparently playful but also domineering gesture.53 When Blair and Bush turned to go inside Number 10, Bush placed his hand in the small of Blair’s back to usher him through the famous black door as if the American owned the place and the Prime Minister was his guest. Consciously or not, he made Blair look small even when they were in the Prime Minister’s home. Their 150 minutes of talks also had the damaging effect of casting the host as the petitioner. Blair had equated the long-term shared strategic interests between Britain and America with giving unswerving support for one particular, right-wing administration. The tighter he hugged, the less he seemed to be getting in influence. Bush gave nothing on the US trade tariffs which were a sharp point of dispute between the governments. Some of his advisers urged the Prime Minister to say: ‘Get your tanks off my lawn.’ As ever, says Stephen Wall, Blair’s preference was ‘to duck and weave rather than have a confrontation’.54 Nor did the discussions yield any fresh strategy to retrieve the situation in Iraq. They were also supposed to have talked about the fate of British citizens and residents held at the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Camp X-Ray became globally notorious from the moment it was set up during the Afghan campaign. Some of those caged at Gitmo were truly very dangerous men; some might be a threat, but there was no hard evidence against them; some should never have been caged at all. The use of this legal black hole to detain prisoners without charge on an indefinite basis undermined the allies’ claims that they were champions of human rights and the rule of law. Many regarded the camp as a monstrosity. The most senior legal figures in Blair’s Government were appalled. Peter Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, regarded Camp X-Ray as ‘an outrage’.55 Charlie Falconer, the Lord Chancellor and one of the Prime Minister’s oldest friends, thought the prison camp was ‘very damaging’.56 Falconer and Goldsmith repeatedly urged Blair to press Bush to close it down. They were wasting their breath. Blair contemptuously shrugged aside their objections to Camp X-Ray. ‘If you want to fight terrorism, you’ve got to be serious about it,’ he dismissed his lawyer friends.57 Blair would only ever describe the camp as ‘an anomaly’. He did not dissent at their joint news conference when Bush scorned the prisoners’ right to rights by dismissing them as ‘illegals picked off of a battlefield’.58

  The Government briefed that it was lobbying the Americans to release the British detainees at Guantanamo. The Foreign Office ‘constantly raised’ the issue with the Americans.59 Yet Blair himself would not apply any pressure, which left the White House with the understandable impression that he was not seriously interested in the prisoners. The Prime Minister was told that they almost certainly couldn’t be tried under British law.60 Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell, the leader and foreign affairs spokesman of the Liberal Democrats, raised the question of the prisoners at a private half-hour meeting with the President during the State visit. Bush told them: ‘If you want these people back from Guantanamo, send us the plane tickets.’61 The problem was not his unwillingness to let them go; the problem was that Blair wouldn’t press for their release.

  On the final day of Bush’s visit, the American cavalcade descended on Sedgefield. Marine One, accompanied by a decoy duplicate of the presidential helicopter and three Apache gunships, thundered towards Trimdon. ‘We could hear the helicopters long before we could see them,’ says one awed member of Blair’s staff. ‘It was Apocalypse Now.’ 62

  The American Valkyries swooped down on the field behind Blair’s house. They descended in such a blast of wind that the soldiers ringing the field swayed like trees in a hurricane. One trooper was blown clean off his feet. Myrobella was a modest three-bedroom home among humble mining terraces. The President’s Secret Service detail registered the difference in scale between the Prime Minister’s constituency home and Bush’s 1,600-acre ranch in Texas. Looking at Myrobella, one of the Secret Service men said to another: ‘We’re not going to lose him in here.’63

  In a bizarre scene, Blair and Bush ate fish, chips and mushy peas in the snug of the village pub talking global politics with John Burton and a selection of well-behaved local Labour activists supping at their pints. The teetotal Bush sipped a non-alcoholic lager. Anti-war protestors were contained behind rings of steel barriers well out of earshot of the President.

  Air Force One then took the American tourist home. One US commentator noted: ‘Everything President George Bush did in London reinforced the idea that this was a trip made not so much to thank the British people for their friendship, but to send a message to the voters back home that he was at ease as a world leader.’64

  That was confirmed by the broad smile on the face of Karl Rove. He had the video footage he wanted of Bush with the Prime Minister and the Queen. What benefit it served Tony Blair or Britain was much harder to discern.

  Soon after breakfast on Sunday, 14 December, the phone rang at Chequers. It was Jonathan Powell on the line with breaking news from Iraq. We’ve got him, the Chief of Staff told ‘a very pleased’ Prime Minister.65 They had finally captured Saddam Hussein, who was run literally to earth. American forces found him lurking in a rudimentary hideout in a ‘spider hole’ dug beneath the farm of his former cook, ten miles south of the former dictator’s home town of Tikrit. ‘He was caught like a rat,’ rejoiced the American Major-General in charge of the operation.66 He revealed that Saddam was captured with a pistol he did not use, a couple of Kalashnikov assault rifles and a stash of three quarters of a million dollars in $100 notes.

  The allies had been so desperate to capture ‘High Value Target Number One’ that the Americans put a bounty on his head of $25 million. Many Iraqis celebrated this as the final release from his vicious dictatorship. Blair was cheered but sensibly wary of looking too euphoric. He left Chequers for Number 10, changed out of Sunday casuals and went out into Downing Street to deliver some consciously ungloating remarks expressing the hope that the lifting of Saddam’s ‘shadow’ would open the way to the reconstruction of Iraq.67

  That lack of triumphalism was well-judged. The strutting dictator who had ruled millions by fear emerged from his hole in the ground with a long, grey beard and looking haggard and mangy, a tyrant turned into a tramp. To the surprise of intelligence officials, Saddam did not have any communication equipment in his bolt-hole, not even a mobile phone. That wrecked
their theory that he was the spider at the centre of a secret web which was co-ordinating resistance to the allies. It shattered the belief that getting him was the key to reducing the violence. ‘Although his capture was a major news event, our abiding concern by this stage was how could we put out the fires that had been unleashed,’ says one of Blair’s officials.68 George Bush made a special televised address in which he celebrated Saddam’s capture: ‘A hopeful day has arrived.’69 Moments later, a bomb blast shook the centre of Baghdad and was followed by a series of increasingly bold drive-by shootings, explosions and suicide attacks.70

  When Blair went out to Iraq in early January, he did not visit Baghdad, which was now judged too unsafe after an assassination attempt on Paul Bremer. The Prime Minister’s visit was confined to British-controlled Basra. The public relations dimension of the visit was a speech to British soldiers and marines at their base outside the city in which he repeated his constant assertion that ‘in years to come’ people ‘will look back on what you have done and give thanks and recognise that they owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude’.71

  The more crucial element of the visit was supposed to be the opportunity to get a first-hand assessment of the facts on the ground from Bremer, the American potentate responsible for the calamitous decisions to disband the Iraqi army and to purge the Government of its administrators.72 Blair and Bremer chatted over a cup of tea in the British commander’s quarters at the airport. There was a long discussion about the negotiations over a new constitution and elections. Only then did Blair ask: ‘What’s your opinion of the security situation?’ Bremer gave an optimistic account. Most of the soldiers of the disbanded army were farmers ‘happy to be home alive with their children’. Jeremy Greenstock flew down from Baghdad with Bremer. On the account of both of them, the American viceroy faced no serious probing from the Prime Minister. At the conclusion, they shook hands, with Bremer remarking: ‘Failure is not an option.’ ‘I agree completely,’ said a smiling Blair, who left the American with the impression that the Prime Minister was ‘sympathetic’ and ‘relaxed’.73

  Greenstock was frustrated that Blair had not asked the hard questions about the state of Iraq. ‘He didn’t want to confront the full horror of it all.’74

  In the New Year, the prescient British envoy warned London that another 50,000 to 100,000 allied troops were required if Iraq was not to tip over the abyss. The message was not welcome.

  Blair’s attitude towards Iraq in 2003 and 2004 travelled through the spectrum of emotions from triumph, complacency, anxiety, denial, panic and terror before he reached despair. At this stage, he was still in denial. Some of his colleagues were already travelling to despair. During Foreign Office questions in the Commons, Jack Straw whispered to one of his junior ministers: ‘I long for Iraq to go away. Every morning I get up and it is still there.’75

  It had become the defining issue of Blair’s premiership. Europe, public services, everything that once seemed so important were subordinated by war and terror in both his own mind and the view of his shrinking band of friends and growing army of enemies. In a speech in his constituency in early March, he acknowledged that ‘a large part of the public want to move on.’ He had read the results of Philip Gould’s focus groups saying that voters wanted the Government to concentrate on the economy, health, education and crime, the things it had been elected to sort out. Blair could not move on. ‘It remains my fervent view that the nature of the global threat we face is real and existential and it is the task of leadership to expose it and fight it, whatever the political cost,’ he contended. ‘Sit in my seat. What would you have done?’ he asked his critics. This marked how altered he had been by the Iraq experience. He was saying: you may not trust me any more, but I am still right. Once the master of the politics of persuasion, he was retreating into the politics of assertion. This was accompanied by rhetorical inflation of the nature of the menace. He spoke of a ‘mortal threat’ from ‘devilish’ fanatics ‘prepared to bring about Armageddon’.76 His main speechwriter these days often appeared to be the Book of Revelations.

  Just a week later, al-Qaeda committed mass murder on a vast scale in Spain, when terrorists exploded ten bombs on commuter trains during rush hour at the Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia stations in Madrid. More than 200 people were slaughtered, and another 1,500 injured, in the worst atrocity since 9/11. For Blair, this was the latest proof of the deadliness of ‘the new menace of our time’ posed by those ‘hellbent on doing evil’ through ‘terrorism waged without limit’. In the immediate aftermath of the outrages in Madrid, he warned that ‘we must be prepared for them to strike whenever and however they can.’77 This was giving voice to his worst inner fear. As one of his intimates put it: ‘You can never over-estimate how anxious Tony feels about something horrendous happening on his watch.’78 He told his country that Britain should ‘never be afraid to be at the front of this new war’.79

  Many Britons were afraid. And they blamed him for putting their families on that front line. To a growing body of opinion, the Madrid atrocity was further evidence that the war in Iraq served only to intensify the threat and make targets of European countries that supported the invasion. ‘This is the story of how a sophisticated democracy has been misled by one misguided messianic figure,’ read one typical hostile commentary. ‘Mr Blair by his words and actions has identified this country as the one which al-Qaeda – after America – most wants to attack.’80 Polling suggested that three quarters of British voters now thought that the war had made an attack on Britain more likely.81

  At the dramatic election four days after the bombings, Spain’s centre-right Popular Party, which had been ahead in the polls until the attack, was swept out of power. It was the first time that a single terrorist act had a direct effect on the outcome of an election in a Western country. The anti-war Socialist Party came to power, announcing that Spain would be ending all its commitments to Iraq. ‘Mr Blair and Mr Bush must do some reflection,’ said the new Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Zapatero. ‘You can’t organise a war with lies.’82 This was a shock to Number 10: it was unusually blunt for one European leader to publicly brand another as mendacious.

  On 24 March, Blair flew out to Madrid for the state funeral of the victims and forty-five minutes of talks with the new Prime Minister. Blair spent nearly all of that time trying to persuade Zapatero not to withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq until security could be handed over to the UN. He failed. The military importance of those troops was not great; it was the symbolism that counted. Blair now looked yet more isolated in his continuing alliance with Bush.

  From a funeral for victims of atrocity, Blair flew across the Mediterranean for a remarkable visit to a regime with a notorious history of sponsoring terrorism. When he landed in Tripoli, it was the first time a British Prime Minister had visited the capital of Libya during the long, eccentric and murderous dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The previous December, the Colonel declared that he was abandoning his WMD programme in the hope that this would end three decades of isolation. Sir Richard Dearlove and MI6 officers played a critical role in persuading Gaddafi’s regime to give up on chemical and nuclear weapons. For Blair, this capitulation by one of the world’s rogue states, identified by Bush as a member of the ‘Axis of Evil’, was one result of the war in Iraq that he could hail as a success. It was nevertheless risky and controversial to visit a tyrant once condemned by Ronald Reagan as the ‘mad dog’ of the Arab world. Margaret Thatcher had allowed Reagan to send US planes from British soil to bomb Libya in retaliation for its role in terrorism.

  Gaddafi had armed the IRA and sponsored an alphabet soup of other murderous groups. A Libyan spy was the only person ever convicted for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.83 Jack Straw and the Foreign Office took considerable care to prepare the ground with the relatives of the Lockerbie victims. Officials also talked to those campaigning to bring to justice the killer of Yvonne Fletcher, the policewoman who had b
een shot from within the Libyan embassy twenty years previously. ‘It is strange, given the history, to come here and do this,’ Blair acknowledged during the trip. ‘But the world is changing and we have to do everything we can to tackle the security threat.’ That included grasping ‘the hand of partnership’ when it was offered by regimes ready to change their ways.84

  It was a consistent characteristic of Blair that he would try to do business with any foreign leader of just about any complexion who showed some indication of wanting to reciprocate. This led him to Libya and the most extraordinary international encounter of his premiership.

  A darkened Mercedes drove him out to the southern outskirts of Tripoli, where Gaddafi was waiting in his tented mini-city in a grove of eucalyptus trees. ‘Are you exhausted?’ asked Gaddafi. ‘You do age quickly in this job,’ responded Blair. Camels grunted in the background. Blair had been warned that Gaddafi would probably offer him camel milk. He was told not to touch the stuff, which was notorious for causing flatulence. That was why Gaddafi would offer it.

  Dressed in an ankle-length maroon robe, with a matching velvet cap, Gaddafi lounged back in his seat. He displayed the sole of his foot – a highly insulting gesture in the Muslim world – at Blair. This was designed to play to the Arab street when they saw the encounter on television. The Prime Minister pretended that he hadn’t noticed what the dictator was up to. Over lunch, he talked about New Labour’s version of the ‘Third Way’. Gaddafi delved into his robe and produced a copy of his Third Universal Theory. He then offered some suggestions on how to run a totalitarian state. When Tony Blair used to talk about ‘Big Tent’ politics, he never imagined that it would encompass sharing fish couscous in a Bedouin marquee with Colonel Gaddafi. He found the entire experience surreal, but worth it.